Monday, Aug. 09, 1971

Transplanting Teachers

A bitter chill has settled over the U.S. academic job market as financially squeezed schools and colleges find themselves turning out more teachers than they can afford to hire. In Germany, things are the other way round: the booming economy's demand for technical experts has created a shortage of high school science and math teachers. To education planners in the German state of Hamburg, the contrast was opportune. Rather than train more pedagogues by a slow, expensive expansion of their highly elite university system, the officials decided simply to import part of the U.S. surplus. The results were flabbergasting.

A Great Adventure. Placing notices with the American Federation of Teachers and an academic job registry in Washington, the officials demanded basic knowledge of German. They offered modest $530-$700 monthly salaries (compared with the U.S. yearly average of $9,300) and two-year contracts. With-in a fortnight, Hamburg had 500 applicants. Of the 100 who subsequently got firm offers, 84 signed up. All have previously been teachers at the college level. About half have master's degrees; the rest are Ph.D.s, no less.

Last week the first 46 of Hamburg's new teachers arrived via a charter flight paid for by the Germans. "It all sounded like a great adventure," said Newlywed William Woodcock III. "Neither my wife nor I had ever been outside the U.S." The teacher transplant idea is catching on fast. One neighboring German state has started U.S. advertising of its own. Two others have asked Hamburg for the names of the 400 applicants it rejected.

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